Writing Process Blog Hop

I like you people. Sometimes you make blogging really easy. (Which is sometimes necessary, because you occasionally have days where you’re crockpotting dinner and it’s been in there for two hours before you realize you never turned the crockpot on.)

(Sigh.)

Siri Paulson has tagged me in a writing blog hop that’s making the rounds. There’s four questions to be answered, and then you tag three other writers at the end of the post to answer the same questions. (Be the way, feel free to tag yourself if you’d like. I admit I’m somewhat terrible at knowing who reads my blog on a regular basis. It goes EVERYWHERE.)

Anyway, on to the show. Questions are about writing process and so forth.

1. What am I working on?

I’m writing the first draft of the third book of a high fantasy trilogy. I have been working on this trilogy for a full half my life which is, quite frankly, a little ridiculous. I hope to have the first book ready to go out in search of an agent/publisher by the end of the year, but I think that’s probably wishful thinking. After I finish the third book here, I want to do a round with betas (I’m hoping to get a few to do just the third book, and a few to do all three) and then I’ll need to do an entire edit on the first book. (Well, and the other two eventually. But probably not before the first book goes out.)

I’m also continuing the very slow work on my serial science fiction, which I have been working on for something insane, like three or four years. This is what happens when you write a scene a month. I think it’s somewhere between 40 and 50K, word count-wise. It will never be finished.

2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?

This is an interesting question because I tend to write all over the place (mostly high and urban fantasy, but also occasionally science fiction, paranormal, and horror). I also think it’s a little too broad. I mean, I can tell you why a specific work is different from its contemporaries, but how my overall body of work differs? Yeah.

I mostly write in what is now being called the “New Adult” age range, which is aimed at people between the ages of 18 and 25 or so. There’s not a lot of “typical” NA books because the categorization is so new. So I don’t really have a lot to say here.

But to go back to the question at hand, if we take my fantasy trilogy, it’s different because while there are humans in this world, my main characters are not human. And my serial science fiction is what I’ve taken to calling “stealth” science fiction, because the science fiction elements, while foreshadowed throughout the entire story, don’t really become apparent until about halfway.

3. Why do I write what I do?

I write stories because I want to know what happens. And I write speculative fiction because, I’m sorry, I get enough real life most of the time, and I don’t need it in my entertainment as well. Also, if I want to have venomous wolves in my fantasy, nobody’s going to tell me no, dangit.

4. How does my writing process work?

I am a terrible person and change my process all the time. I feel like each story needs different types of preparation, and different amounts of it, so I’m kind of all over the place during the writing stage. Sometimes I outline from the beginning, sometimes I outline from the middle. Sometimes I do research. Sometimes I do worldbuilding.

Editing is a more standard process that requires a lot of left-brained work right at the beginning, where I look at character arcs, plot, setting, worldbuilding, etc., identify what’s wrong with each, what needs to be changed, and outline the heck out of the story. And then I go back and essentially rewrite half the book, cuz that’s how I roll.

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